"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

"It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."--Bryan Stevenson

Monday, July 09, 2018

The Very Model Of A Modern Major Elitist

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, shared a Facebook post Monday claiming that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) was being falsely accused of lying about his knowledge of rampant sexual assault while coaching wrestling at Ohio State University.

“Jim Jordan is under attack, with false accusations, because he threatens the elite,” she wrote on the post with the video below.

Only 9 people at any one time sit on the Supreme Court. Once appointed, they are all there for life. It is the very definition of "elite." It has vast power over the lives of everyone in America, and often beyond America, and is the last word in law in the American judicial system.

5 Comments:

Hecate called for a future Democrat with a future Democratic Senate to do what Roosevelt tried to do and backed down from doing, putting more than nine justices on the court. I don't think there's any Constitutional limit on how many members can be on it and the Court, itself, wouldn't have any power to disqualify a tenth or an 18th member. She pointed out that the number of cases needing to be heard is far larger than in Roosevelt's day and there has been a lot of howling and whining on the part of Justices that their work load is too great. She said that a panel of the court could be chosen by random to hear cases.

Reading a recent article at Five-Thirty-Eight about the abysmal ignorance of mathematics among the sitting justices and their refusal to do the work to understand complex mathematical issues even when they're at the heart of a case, I think it's time for there to be a requirement that justices hearing a case have sufficient mathematical, if not scientific, knowledge enough to know what it is they're deciding.

Our 18th century government is imploding because we live in the 21st century, Putin is smart enough to do what the billionaires here and their hirelings do, find every way to ratfuck each and every inadequacy and defect in the Constitution and the Supreme Court rulings that they can identify.

The Constitution only establishes a Supreme Court and a judiciary system. How those two are actually fashioned (i.e., number of justices, number of courts, levels of appellate courts, etc.) is up to Congress. There's no impediment to making the Court larger; it has certainly been smaller in our early history.

The ignorance of the Court in many complex technical matters (not least of which is simply how people behave; the Burger court decision to allow lawyers to advertise is still an embarrassingly naive one, resting on the idea no true lawyer would ever misbehave, or misrepresent) undermines their authority more and more. The gravest problem with Trump's appointments and arguments about overruling Roe (which probably won't happen; restrictions on abortion will probably simply be more pronounced) is not that stare decisis might die, but that the court's reputation as a neutral arbiter might dissolve, and the courts become simply another political player, albeit an unelected one.

And that's when the shit REALLY hits the fan. We're there now, for all practical purposes. The idea of court neutrality is a rotted fig-leaf at best, more honored in the breach than in the keeping.

We are there now. Apparently Anthony Kennedy was induced to retire in exchange for assurances his former clerk would take his seat. What effect did this quid pro quo have on his recent decisions?

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh opened up the process by lying and sucking up to Trump right out of the gate, saying that no president in history had ever considered such a wide variety of candidates. Of course that’s not true historically, it’s not true factually, and it’s so far from the truth as to be considered utter propaganda on the part of the regime.

In other words, he knows about the quid pro quo that resulted in his nomination and is trying to obfuscate what really happened. What effect will thst have on his decisions?

In other news, Alan Dershowitz is laying the groundwork for the Court to intervene and “overturn” a potential Trump impeachment, saying that since collusion with a foreign power to steal an election isn’t the kind of high crime the Founders has in mind when drafting the Constitution that Trump will simply refuse to step down, appeal to the SC, and be exonerated because Trump will have appointed the justices reviewing the case.

I'd say that I'd like to punch Dershowitz in the mush but if I did it would only be because I can't figure out a way to do what would be the ultimate in causing him pain, finding some way to make ignoring him into an active act he couldn't ignore than the passive act it is.

In a just world he would be disbarred like they did to Roy Cohn and for him to know he had been.